Mom’s honest email signature captures the summer struggle for working parents
One mom's honest email signature is striking a chord with working parents across the country.
Meg St-Esprit, 39, says she hit a breaking point one evening while she was looking up expensive camps and trying to interview babysitters for the summer.
"I was realizing it was all untenable with four kids," St-Esprit, who lives in Pittsburgh, tells TODAY.com.
In that moment, she received what she describes as a "snippy email" from someone who was unhappy that she had not replied in 24 hours.
"In the moment, I was like: 'This is how it's going to be — people are going to need to know that this is how it's going to be for the next couple months,'" St-Esprit, a freelance journalist, says. "I'm still good at my job. I'm still a professional. I'm also a mom of four kids and this is reality in America."
St-Esprit then created a new email signature.
"Please note I may be slower to respond to email in the months of June, July and August due to the United States' inability to provide affordable childcare for working mothers," she wrote.
The United States is an outlier among industrialized nations when it comes to subsidizing child care, spending just 0.2% of its gross domestic product on child care for children 2 and under, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Other nations part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a forum of 37 democratic countries with market-based economies, spend an average of of 0.8% on child care for young children with some Nordic countries going up to 1.7% of their total spending. In 2019, the U.S. spent less than $500 a year per child age 0-2, according to the Department of the Treasury.
Some folks who saw my email signature commented on it, so I wanted to share. The US is the only developed nation w/o subsidized childcare. Adding it would increase our GDP over 1 trillion dollars. Not a handout — it’s a smart decision when facing a recession and labor shortages. pic.twitter.com/iZGLMg1PJW
— Meg St-Esprit (@MegStEsprit) May 31, 2023
St-Esprit says that while she came up with the idea for the email signature "in the moment," it was also the result of years of her time reporting on and living through the many ways "society fails mothers."
"We all know that it was a long time coming," she adds.
After writing the signature, St-Esprit says she questioned if it was "professional" and even considered changing it back.
"I work with a lot of clients, so I thought maybe I should delete it," St-Esprit says. "Then people started to reply to it, writing: 'Side note: I love this.' 'Side note: Oh my gosh, this.' So I decided to post it (on Twitter), and obviously it has hit a chord with so many mothers.
"Everyone is feeling this," she adds. "Everyone wants to be able to know that if you're at the pool with your kids and you're planning to work until 11 p.m. that night to catch up — which is what I do — that you don't have to respond to that email right away."
Today I went to my 4yo’s PreK Counts classroom for yoga with a special grownup. This is the only subsidized childcare my children have been able to access as middle earners and it’s been a GIFT. It also reduces educational costs long term because of the early education benefits. pic.twitter.com/hYUt5h129h
— Meg St-Esprit (@MegStEsprit) May 31, 2023
According to a 2021 poll focused on the effects of COVID-19 on families conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 1 in 3 working families say they struggle to find the child care they need.
The issue is even more dire for Black and Latino families — the same poll found that 63% of Black families with children under 18 and 59% of Latino families say they have "serious financial problems" that impact their ability to access child care.
In 2022, the U.S. lost a reported $122 billion in lost earnings, productivity and revenue as a result of unattainable child care, according to a report from the Council for a Strong America, a bipartisan nonprofit.
St-Esprit — who has an 11 year old, twin 9 year olds and a 4 year old — says her youngest was able to qualify for a free pre-kindergarten program this year. For the first time, all of her children were in school.
Now that school has ended, St-Esprit says she's going to do what she has always done: Rely on her mom and babysitters when she can, and work until midnight, meaning she will run on 4 or 5 hours of sleep for three months.
"I get anxiety leading up to summer," St-Esprit says. "I wish I was excited about it. I love my kids. But I know I'm going to have to be on on.
"We joke about, 'Is it time for the kids to go back to school yet?' I wish I didn't feel that way," she adds. "It's just burnout from trying to juggle everything."
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
